Using copyrighted photos – Are you sure you want to do that?

“Oh, I did a search and found a couple that I liked and put them on my site.”

Several years ago, a colleague of mine asked me if I had heard of “The Letter.” I told her that I hadn’t, and she shared with me a story about how photographers were starting to fight back against people who were getting photographs which they had taken from the internet and using them in their own websites.

Getty Images (1) is one of the world’s largest sources of professional photographic and video footage. Their high quality images generally stand out from the crowd in an internet image search, and many a blogger and webmaster has downloaded them and used them in their website, knowingly or unknowingly.

When Getty images finds that one of their images has been used without a license, “The Letter” (2) gets sent out to them.

The letter simply says (paraphrasing) “You’re using one of our pictures without a license. This may be unintentional. Show us your license for the picture, or pay us $XXX.00 settlement fee and remove the picture, or contact us about purchasing a license. Click here to pay.”

In my experience, I have heard several guidelines about what is and is not copyright infringement. The most common line I have heard is that if one changes at least 75% of a paragraph, then they are compliant with the law. However, none of the research done for this article supports this, nor could we find a credible source which drew a line between “this is okay,” and “this gets you in trouble.”

The simplest way to avoid copyright infringement issues is to not use somebody else’s work. If you didn’t create it, pay for it, or receive permission to use it, don’t use it.

If the the modifications made to a photo are judged to be “derivative” in nature (altered artwork or photos), that gets you in trouble. However, if it is judged as being “transformative” (creating a whole new piece of artwork), then you might be safe from a copyright infringement violation.

This is a subjective issue, meaning that decisions are based on someone else’s judgement and your ability to convince them that what you are doing is transformative vs. derivative, and therefore legal.